There is good chance that the OBJ file you are using doesnt have materials applied to it. There is a tutorial I made up on the Chaos forums for using Blender to make vrmeshes. Try this method.

@ascolima said: This same exact laptop and graphics card had windows Vista before and I never had a problem with sketchUp. I was able to select the OpenGL acceleration and all my models ran smoothly. the recent intel HD Graphics 4000 is definitely better than Thomas ol' GMA 4500 but surely still no first choice for high poly count models. @ascolima said: But I went to my laptop's manufacturer website and downloaded the driver there, and that fixed it!! Now I'm running Sketchup smoothly on Windows 8 with the graphics driver for Windows 7, and my openGL acceleration is available... many current notebooks (make/model?) do have 2 graphics subsytems integrated, the lame/integrated but powersaving intel HD graphics is used for office/internet/video stuff and the fast/dedicated but powerconsuming GeForce or Radeon is activated if processing of e.g. 3D graphics output accelerated by OpenGL is required. For doing this the appropriate video driver for these hybrid graphics solutions needs to be installed, which is typically distributed by the manufacturer of the notebook.